When the Department of Justice (DOJ) began investigating Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) following racial-profiling allegations, Arpaio said “bring it on.” Now, four months later, he has announced that he will no longer cooperate with DOJ officials. Instead, Arpaio, with the help of attorney Robert Driscoll, has filed a tit-for-tat request with the DOJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility to investigate the DOJ’s investigation of him.

Arpaio thinks the DOJ’s actions are politically-motivated and thus refuses to open up his doors so that the DOJ can “come in and find something.” At a press conference hosted yesterday, Arpaio complained that the DOJ is being a bully, saying “Don’t pick on me to show you’re doing something. If you’re going to do it, pick on someone that’s guilty — there’s a big difference here.” Arpaio’s lawyer also put his foot down and said, “there will be no wholesale cooperation until they can articulate what, specifically, he did wrong.” Driscoll explains:

“This case puts the constitutionality of the 287g program squarely into question and is therefore incumbent upon the federal government to defend its own statutes. Instead, the federal government is choosing to go after the Sheriff’s Office and the deputies who enforce their statute to the letter.”

However, the DOJ isn’t “going after” Arpaio for participating in the 287g program which gives local law enforcement officials the power to enforce federal immigration laws. They’re concerned about the way in which his office is implementing it. Sheriff Arpaio has had 2,700 law suits filed against him between 2004 and 2007 — 50 times the number of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston combined. The majority of inmates in his jails are, not surprisingly, Latino males. Also, you’d think being a hot-shot Washington lawyer, Driscoll might realize that the DOJ is in the process of conducting the investigation precisely to find out what, if anything, Arpaio has “done wrong.” Without Arpaio’s cooperation, it’s conveniently unlikely that they’ll come to a conclusion any time soon.

An Arizona local news station also brought Arpaio’s blatant hypocrisy to light. Not only did the Sheriff tell the DOJ, “be my guest” when the investigation began, he also attacked the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors for not cooperating with his own investigation of them. Watch it:

Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox stated that Arpaio’s investigation of her was also politically-motivated, saying he was trying to intimidate her with a “vendetta” over her criticism of the way he enforces immigration.

On this date in 1999 — the 18th of Tir in the Persian calendar — Iranian riot police and Basij militia brutally cracked down on student demonstrators in Tehran, leading to five days of the largest protests in the history of the Islamic Republic — that is, until those of June 2009.

“Without July 1999,” writes Shirin Sadeghi, “there could never have been June 2009. What the students courageously started then, has led to a massive and pervasive movement that encompasses all Iranians. The students are no longer alone in their struggle for change.”

Several thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tehran today to mark the 18th of Tir, and Iranian riot police again responded with tear gas and truncheons.

On a press call organized by the Huffington Post, three Iranians discussed the significance of this day, and the future of the Green movement in Iran.

Iranian human rights activist Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, who was a member of the Iranian parliament from 2000 to 2004 and is currently a visiting scholar at the Center for Women in Politics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts, noted that, while today’s protest have not been as massive as those in the immediate wake of the elections, they have been large, with demonstrators from all walks of life carrying green signs to signify unity.

Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the official spokesman of Mir-Hossein Moussavi’s campaign abroad, reviewed the history of student movements in Iran, noting that “even before the Islamic revolution the student movement was big part of the movement against shah, [and] students have continued to be pioneers in the peoples’ movement.” The Green movement, Makhmalbaf said, “is a continuation of the student movement of 1999 — it’s just become more widespread, more people participating”:

What we lacked in Iran was not people’s knowledge of repression, but courage. That is what they have found. If the students were pioneers it’s because they were more courageous, [but] the people have regained their courage because they have regained their solidarity and common spirit.

We owe this to two things. People took part in elections in unexpected numbers, [and] this let them know that they are united in what they seek. The second were the rallies after elections, [which] allowed people to see and believe that they are not alone. When they chant “Don’t be afraid, we are all together,” it has a profound meaning — it is a response to the feeling that the government had tried to install in them, to make them feel alone in their desire for a freer society.

Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, stressed how significant it is, both in religious and constitutional terms, that “leading clerics have taken sides with the Green movement.” Because of Supreme Leader Khamenei’s relatively meager scholarly credentials, he “is not even in position to prevent [other clerics] from passing judgment,” as the Association of Researchers and Teachers of Qom did last Friday. “Khamenei’s official position as Supreme Leader has no bearing on his junior position as a jurist,” said Dabashi. “He’s not in a position to disallow the clerical challenge to his authority. ”

Haghighatjoo added that “according to the Iranian constitution, the supreme leader has a supervisional authority over other branches of government, and should be a national authority or symbol. According to the constitution,” key characteristics of the supreme leader’s role are defined as “justice and impartiality.” But in recent events, Haghighatjoo said, Khamenei, by openly siding with Ahmadinejad and his supporters, has “lowered his position” down to that of a “leader of a rogue extreme faction in the Iranian political spectrum.”

Haghighatjoo ended with a call to Western journalists to “please pay attention to plight of imprisoned people in Tehran. They’re being tortured, [their] lives are in danger. Keep them in the news, let the world know… Ask for pressure on Iranian leadership to release prisoners.”

Since taking office, Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) has tried and failed to pass seven pieces of legislation that would either repeal or reinterpret the 14th Amendment’s definition of citizenship. Bilbray is now taking his anti-14th Amendment crusade to the state-level, backing the Taxpayer Revolution’s “Anchor Baby” reform initiative which seeks to limit the rights and benefits of the U.S. citizen children of undocumented immigrants by redefining the 14th Amendment’s jurisdiction.

The California Taxpayer Protection Act of 2010, as it is called, is referred to as a bill for “real world citizens.” What that means, apparently, is that the American-born children of undocumented immigrants would be denied a standard birth certificate and would instead receive a “Foreign Parent” certificate. In order to even register for a birth certificate, undocumented parents would have to provide fingerprints and information that would be reported to federal authorities for deportation. The same applies to parents seeking benefits for their children. However, in their eagerness to rid California of its immigrant population, Bilbray and the bill’s supporters didn’t consider the possibility that most undocumented mothers and fathers will instead choose not to report their child’s birth or seek needed medical care at all, and instead go deeper underground.

Bilbray’s birdbrained 14th Amendment schemes aren’t just impractical, the idiocy of his arguments is insulting. According to Bilbray:

“It is an urban legend that everybody born here is an automatic citizen. When international diplomats are here in the U.S. and they have children, they are not given citizenship…You can’t get a million dollars from your parents if they don’t have it. If your parents have nothing you inherit nothing…This extreme abuse is why we need to get back to the Founding Fathers meaning of immigration. Why are we providing services for Tijuana and not La Paz?”

Urban legend? Actually, in case anyone needed clarification, the U.S. Supreme Court explicitly ruled in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that anyone born in the United States would be a citizen regardless of their parents’ nationality. Also, as Joshua Holland of Alternet points out, the 14th Amendment only applies to those “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” The children of diplomats, however, are subject to diplomatic law. In his support of the proposed California legislation, Bilbray also randomly cited the Calvin Case of 1608 which stipulated who would be considered “loyal English subjects” that enjoyed the King’s protection.

Bilbray was paid $300,000 by the anti-immigrant hate group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) to promote their racist views on the Hill, according to Holland. Now he’s getting paid by the federal government to wage a xenophobic attack on its own constitution. The language of the petition to pass the California bill reads:

“The initiative’s laws will REQUIRE issuance of the official ‘CALIFORNIA BIRTH CERTIFICATE’ for births to ONLY baptized Christian, Jew, or both, citizens and legal permanent residents. Birth to Foreign Parent document issued to all others…Our citizens’ movement will launch the national debate we need to bring an END to illegal ‘birth tourism’ and AUTOMATIC CITIZENSHIP in the United States of America. The movement will uphold the recorded words and real intent of God, Jesus Christ, and the authors of our Constitution.”

Bilbray’s mother emigrated from Australia to the U.S. as a non-citizen. He’s conveniently “carved out exceptions” that would apply to him in all the bills he’s written and backed.

The Washington Post reports today that the Mexican government has employed numerous torture techniques to extract confessions from suspected drug traffickers. The techniques included beatings, suffocation with plastic bags, electric shocks, the insertion of needles under suspects’ finger nails, water torture, and other abuses.

Under what’s known as the Mérida Initiative, the U.S. government agreed in 2007 to provide Mexico with $1.4 billion in funding to fight the war on drugs, but 15 percent (or $90.7 million) of the original funding and $24 million authorized under the Obama administration will be released only after the “secretary of state reports that Mexico has made progress on human rights.”

The reports of torture put that money’s release in jeopardy. As a result, Mexican human rights workers are accusing the U.S. of hypocrisy when it comes to human rights abuses, citing the mistreatment of suspected terrorists under President Bush. The Post explains:

Many Mexican human rights activists do not support the [human rights] conditions, noting that they were imposed by a U.S government widely accused of torturing prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“It really takes a lot of cynicism, a lot of hypocrisy, for the United States to say, ‘We will give you money to fight drug trafficking as long as you respect human rights,’” said José Raymundo Díaz Taboada, director of the Acapulco office of the Collective Against Torture and Impunity, which documents abuses in Guerrero.

The accusations of hypocrisy highlight one of the hard-to-quantify costs of the Bush administration’s use of torture against suspected terrorists to extract unreliable intelligence: the loss of credibility as a champion of human rights. In recent months and years, in fact, a growing number of nations have rejected calls from the U.S. to end human rights abuses, citing the Bush administration’s actions:

China: In response to the State Department’s annual human rights report critical of the Chinese government, a government spokesman said the report “exposed the double standards and downright hypocrisy of the United States on the human rights issue, and inevitably impaired its international image.” [3/12/2008]

Iran: The L.A. Times reported on Iran’s latest response to the State Department’s latest human rights report, writing, “Iranian officials regularly accuse the West of hypocrisy in zeroing in on Iran’s human rights record, citing prisoner abuse allegations in the prison facility at Guantanamo Bay. [3/11/09]

Russia: In response to criticism from former Vice President Dick Cheney regarding Russia’s human rights abuses, then-Russian President Vladimir Putin asked, “Where is all this pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests?” [5/11/06. Similar remarks: 3/27/08]

Venezuela: The Venezuelan government responded to a recent State Department report on Human Trafficking, saying, “It is scandalous that a country…where torture has been practiced and terrorists are protected, pretends to prop itself up as a judge of human rights in the world.” [6/19/09]

As Matt Yglesias recently explained, the abuses that go on in Iran, China, North Korea, and other nations are perpetrated on a much wider scale and have gone on far longer than those that occurred in U.S. detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba. But the fact remains that “whenever you read about these kind of techniques being applied in Iran or North Korea, it’s immediately apparent to everyone that it’s torture, it’s cruel, it’s inhumane, and it’s wrong.” Indeed, it was immediately apparent to the world that the U.S. abuses were torture as well. Now, Obama must work to rebuild the credibility that his predecessor squandered.